ROSE BACK­ROAD

£1950.37 (+P&P) > Spice up your com­mute

It’s of­ten said that cy­clo-cross bikes can make pretty good com­muter and ur­ban bikes too, and that’s the idea be­hind the Rose Back­Road. Rose bills the Back­Road frame as its gravel/ad­ven­ture chas­sis, but in among the var­i­ous drop-bar builds of the Back­Road de­signed for es­cap­ing into the wilder­ness, there’s this flat-bar model that’s set up more for the ride back into civil­i­sa­tion.

The stem rises steeply to put you in an up­right po­si­tion for com­fort and con­trol but we flipped it over so it pointed down dur­ing the test­ing pe­riod. It gave the Back­Road a racier ride po­si­tion than Rose in­tended but it helped the bike fly dur­ing com­mutes. Large vol­ume 40mm Sch­walbe G-One tyres pro­vide a great deal of com­fort with­out sac­ri­fic­ing too much rolling speed and meant sneak­ing in off-road short­cuts when the road traf­fic was bad was an easy de­ci­sion to take.

Our 57cm Back­Road weighed 8.74kg, which is pretty im­pres­sive for a sub £2k bike, and even laden-down with mud­guards and bags, it re­mained be­low 10kg. We’d love to see the J-Kit brake hose adapters fit­ted as stan­dard, as that would mean you could eas­ily switch be­tween the flat han­dle­bar for week­day com­mutes and drops (with some funky gear ca­bling) for longer week­end rides. Its Er­gon grips took a bit of time to get into the right po­si­tion, al­though even­tu­ally we swapped them for some more tra­di­tional round ones. The sad­dle is both con­ven­tional and comfy, even with­out padded shorts, which is good news if you want to take the Back­Road to the cof­fee shop on a Sun­day morn­ing.